Revenge of the Republican consultants

Ten of the consulting firms that formed the core of the push to elect Mitt Romney — reaping a combined $1 billion in the process — have survived a tea party assault and are again among the highest-grossing and best-positioned players in Republican politics.

The firms and their consultants have been paid more than $19.6 million for 2014 campaign work through January, according to a POLITICO analysis. They’ve also cemented relationships with some of the GOP’s rising stars, setting up the firms for even bigger paydays headed into the fall, when costly advertising and mail campaigns begin, and for a 2016 presidential campaign expected to be the most expensive in history.

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It’s both vindication for top Republican operatives — who were ridiculed by tea partiers for squandering hundreds of millions of dollars and blamed for blowing the party’s chances at capturing the White House and the Senate — and an illustration of the irreversible privatization of politics.

The firms of Romney’s digital director Zac Moffatt and political director Rich Beeson — Targeted Victory and FLS Connect, respectively — as well as the firm that made huge sums buying ads in 2012 for Karl Rove’s American Crossroads helped establishment favorite Bradley Byrne defeat a tea party primary rival and then a Democrat in a closely watched 2013 Alabama special congressional election.

Targeted Victory, FLS and a handful of other Romney-linked firms are also working for Sens. John Cornyn, Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio; Rep. Paul Ryan; the Republican National Committee; the National Republican Congressional Committee; and a variety of establishment-oriented super PACs like Rove’s American Crossroads, while FLS and the firm of Romney’s top strategist, Stuart Stevens, helpedNew Jersey Gov. Chris Christie win reelection.

“People are either doing good work or they’re not and, if they’re not, the market will ultimately correct itself,” said Moffatt, whose firm was paid $112 million in 2012, and has collected $3 million in fees through January, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service. “This is really a professional’s profession. A lot of people can talk about it, but not everyone can do it. A lot of these people think they can play in the NFL because they play Madden on the weekends, but it’s not that easy.”

Elite political consultants have long been a subject of fascination, partly because they’re in a hyper-competitive field that draws the biggest cash in politics, and also because they can wield major influence for years or even decades, even as the politicians and groups they serve come and go. Consultants are romanticized as mastermindsin Hollywood and the political press, envied by would-be rivals and either lionized for their candidates’ triumphs or blamed for their defeats.

That scrutiny has taken a harsher turn in recent years, particularly on the right, where tea party allies have blasted elite Republican consultants for steering the GOP away from its conservative moorings. The criticism comes as a trend toward outsourcing key campaign functions like fundraising and ad buying has collided with regulatory and legislative shifts and court decisions that sparked a tidal wave of cash into a shadow party system ruled by consultants outside the parties and the campaigns.

Obama’s campaign was celebrated, along with its supportive super PACs and consultants, for successfully navigating this new environment, even as it similarly steered huge sums to independent firms to buy digital and television ads. On the losing side, donors privately pressed Rove and his allies about how his Crossroads groups spent the $325 million they raised. And rival consultants anonymously criticized the Romney effort, alleging the party establishment had enabled a consulting cartel to have a de facto monopoly on the biggest contracts, amassing too much power with too little accountability.

“The consultants are like cockroaches — they’re always going to survive,” said the popular conservative pundit Erick Erickson, a leading tea party voice who emerged as a vocal critic of the GOP consulting class in the wake of 2012. “There is a self-perpetuating racket.” On his influential Red State blog shortly after Election Day, Erickson blasted several top consultants as enforcers of an out-of-touch GOP establishment who fought both the tea party and Democrats, and “raked in millions along the way with a more fractured, minority party in their wake. And they show no signs of recognizing just how much a part of the problem they are.”

A few months after the election, a decidedly anti-establishment vibe coursed through the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference. One panel, entitled “Should We Shoot All the Consultants Now?” featured a fiery speech from erstwhile Democratic pollster Pat Caddell that “blew the lid off CPAC,” according to Rush Limbaugh, who joined the hate-parade, calling the GOP’s elite consultants “a very close-knit, closed group” who are “making filthy amounts of money — $150 million a campaign — whether the candidate wins or loses.”

Particular fire was directed at Romney’s highly touted — and expensive — voter-targeting platform ORCA, which was plagued by widespread snafus on Election Day, while the campaign and its supportive super PACs were called out for paying higher advertising rates than Democrats. Even the RNC’s post-election analysis suggested that the profit motive may have crept into some spending decisions. “Our friends and allies need to fundamentally address the incentive structure for their consultants to encourage a balanced approach to spending,” the RNC wrote in its so-called autopsy of the 2012 election, concluding “the incentive system rewards expensive TV buys.”

Few in the consulting world on either side of the aisle dispute that a certain amount of cronyism — or, at least, inertia — plays some role in determining who gets which contracts. The National Republican Senatorial Committee in November went so far as cut off a firm that was dong business with a tea party group challenging GOP incumbents. And both parties’ congressional campaign arms have close relationships with certain firms, which tend to have an advantage in winning work with individual campaigns.

Likewise, consultants affiliated with their party’s most recent presidential nominee tend to have an inside track for work from their respective national parties and supportive super PACs and nonprofits. Consultants who worked on President Barack Obama’s campaigns are pre-eminent in Democratic politics, just as those with links to Romney enjoy strong ties with the RNC.

Of course, the Romney consultants have fewer connections to tea party favorites like Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, so if either senator wins the 2016 Republican nomination, it could crown an entirely new set of operatives, much as Obama’s victories reordered the Democratic consulting world.

POLITICO’s analysis focused on firms that played major roles in the pro-Romney effort, whose consultants have continued working in GOP politics. Among the highest-grossing consultancies are:

Mentzer Media Service: a Baltimore-based ad-buying firm that was paid $280 million in 2012, primarily by unlimited money outfits including Crossroads, the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future and Koch-backed nonprofits Americans for Prosperity, American Commitment and American Future Fund. It’s been paid $2.2 million in 2014.